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Attention, patriotic parents of eighth-grade boys: given the current Republican timetable for exiting Iraq, you can rest easy, knowing your sons will still have the chance to serve there during the next administration!

WAR, HUH, YEAH, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING … LISTEN TO ME, YEAH: Russ Hoyle shows how the Bushies fed our obliging media lies about W.M.D. in order to manipulate the nation into believing that Going to War (Thomas Dunne) was unavoidable. The hip-hop generation proclaims its political independence in Keli Goff’s Party Crashing (Basic). Citing the power, courage, and strength of women, V.F. contributing editor Dee Dee Myers affirms Why Women Should Rule the World (Harper). Paul Alexander’s Machiavelli’s Shadow (Rodale) charts the ascension of Karl Rove, dark prince of politicization, into the highest echelons of government, and the strategic missteps that plunged him from grace. Hollywood legacies Amanda Goldberg and Ruthana Khalighi Hopper make their fiction debut in Celebutantes (St. Martin’s). Elizabeth Hess’s Nim Chimpsky (Bantam Dell) memorializes the ape whose charm, manners, and gift for sign language force us to reconsider what it means to be human. Cloaked in the guise of crime writer Benjamin Black, John Banville returns with The Silver Swan (Henry Holt). Anthropologist Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming (Bloomsbury) is a chilling history of how climate change has affected the rise and fall of human civilizations. We’ve put our wardrobes, homes, and hair in the hands of gay men—why not our children? Wise, gin-clear, and witty Brett Burke’s The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting (Three Rivers) sends Brazelton and Leach into a time-out. In Scott Spencer’s Willing (Ecco), heartache and the premature onset of a midlife crisis send an ill-fated writer, lusting for a book deal, on a globetrotting sex tour.

The recipes in Cree LeFavour’s The New Steak (Ten Speed) will bring out the beast in shy carnivores and spur tenderloin-holics to tattoo her name on their rump roasts. Having amassed an aircraft carrier’s worth of lies about the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky can now crow Mission Accomplished! (Simon & Schuster). Indeed.

Hooked on Comics

In the wake of World War II, before TV started holding American homes hostage, comic books were all the rage. The bold artwork and irreverent, anti-authoritarian stance spoke to pre-rock-‘n’-roll youth in a way nothing had before. V.F. contributor David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) graphically illustrates the era when pop culture popped, and parents, as well as the church and states, struggled to remedy the spread of the Cracked and Weird disease by outlawing and publicly burning comics and holding televised congressional hearings. Fortunately, as Mad-magazine cover boy Alfred E. Neuman proved, the patient lived.